July 25, 2022

Today is a good day for The Satanic Temple to release its finances

A TikToker spent two minutes talking about why The Satanic Temple can’t help you get an abortion and doesn’t deserve your support.

TST threatened to sue her.

The Satanic Housewife’s forced retraction video

But when it comes to The Satanic Temple, there’s always more and it’s always worse.

Note: As of Nov. 23, 2022, the Temple has filed a lawsuit against her anyway, despite her reading their retraction.
[Complaint]

Now, we would say that regardless of the facts, this was pretty grossly unfair and was solely based on the imbalance in financial resources between a woman and a “famous international religion” bullying her into submission.

But then, as some defenders of The Satanic Temple are already typing, of course we would say that; we’re “biased”.

So it may be more relevant to you that u/Bargeul, a moderator of TST’s own unofficial subreddit r/SatanicTemple also looked into what she said in her video and came to a similar conclusion independently. See the article: “The Struggle for Justice” for another perspective there.

In the interests of meeting everyone at their level, we made a lengthier overview article because this is a very long piece addressing what The Satanic Temple took issue with enough to cry “defamation”. Here is also the same guide but in brief:

  • The first section is looking at the claim that it was defamation to refer to longtime TST leader and current “Director of Ministry” Greg Stevens as being really good friends with Milo Yiannopoulos in the present tense rather than “long ago” in 2016. But in the process, we also uncovered new details about Stevens’ history with rape-apologist and “male supremacist” Mike Cernovich before and after that time.
  • The second section is almost entirely about the reported sexual assault in the Austin chapter that TST investigated for themselves and therefore have declared that anyone talking about it defames them. It is not, however, an isolated event, and just prepare yourself for it because it’s real bad.
  • The third section is about the Temple’s SLAPP suit against us. Shoutout to TST lawyer Matt Kezhaya for logging onto god’s own Reddit.com to help establish that, yes, that is exactly what The Satanic Temple is doing to us.
  • The fourth section is the particularly detailed one, but that’s because we have to reference so many court depositions and other government documents directly. On the record and otherwise under oath, The Satanic Temple’s owners Doug Misicko and Cevin Soling say things that they will admit are untrue but just want you to think aren’t that big of a deal, like whether corporations are owned by who they say they are, whether they use their legal names all the times they’re supposed to, or whether the official treasurer keeps track of the little things like where nonprofit and for-profit money is going.
  • The final section is a recap, and trying to contextualize all of this in the big picture, especially as TST continues to talk about how they care about FREE SPEECH no matter HOW UNPOPULAR—but of course carve out an exception like former members, journalists, billboard companies, and TikTokers. When you give TST resources for abortion fights, every indication is that their real financial priorities are many, many other things more personal to them than that. (Which they could put to rest immediately with basic financial transparency for their overlapping corporations privately owned by the same two people.)

We know that committed sycophants and water-carriers of The Satanic Temple will not care, but there is a lot of information there, and we split it up in pages so that anyone can reference things directly more easily if they need to.

Supplementary material includes:

And if you appreciate the work we do, by all means, please help us keep paying our legal defense against The Satanic Temple’s SLAPP, which you can do each month on Patreon, via GoFundMe, but also PayPal (@QueerSatanic), CashApp ($QueerSatanic), or grabbing some merch on Redbubble.

With that out of the way, let’s start working backward through the video TST took umbrage with, and by the time we finish, you will surely agree: today is a good day for The Satanic Temple to release its finances.

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  1. […] the Houston Press and QueerSatanic, a group of four Seattle-area Satanists that I also reported on, have to say.) Or do pioneering work on other meaty topics, such as religious persecution and clergy sex abuse, […]

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The Satanic Temple's Boogeyman

Queer Satanic

TST sued us from April 2020 to September 2024, and we are still here.